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A review by liralen
Most Ardently by Susan Mesler-Evans
2.0
Pride and Prejudice and lesbians? And racial and gender diversity? Yes please. Sign me up.
Unfortunately, Pride and Prejudice retellings so rarely get it right, or even come close. I've read (more than) my fair share of clunkers, and this definitely isn't among the worst offenders ([b:Mr. Darcy, Vampyre|6691280|Mr. Darcy, Vampyre|Amanda Grange|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1479860257l/6691280._SY75_.jpg|6755766] comes to mind). It's just not doing anywhere near what I'd hoped for.
Let's break it down:*
Some parts of Pride and Prejudice just don't translate well to the modern day. Take the multiple weeks(!) Julieta spends at Bobby's when she has the flu, and the weeks Elisa spends with them. This made sense in the 1800s, when travel was more arduous and medicine less reliable. But here it's just...odd. More so that Elisa keeps getting homesick and so on, and it occurs to no one that she could...like...go home. For an afternoon, or permanently. Between Bobby's and Darcy's many drivers and cars, she could be home and back in less than an hour. Julieta's happy to have her there, but it's not like she's glued to Julieta's side: she goes to class, she spends hours suffering through Darcy's company downstairs, et cetera.
Similarly, Elisa's community college class spends a week (spring break) visiting the Pemberley Museum of Art. Again, this makes sense in an Austen-era context; it makes less sense in a contemporary context. An entire week? At one museum? For a community college class? And student costs (including ravel and lodging) are only $100? I'm not knocking community colleges, but I doubt many would have the funds to make that week so affordable for students...or that would devote a whole week to one museum in the first place.
Both of these things could be easily solved: Give Julieta and Elisa's room at their flat a mould problem that has to be fixed before they can sleep there again, and bam, there's a reason to stay with Bobby. Send Elisa to Pemberley with a couple classmates for a long weekend to work on a final project, have them crash with a classmate's family, and oh hey look I think we're back in the realm of semi-realistic. Bringing Pride and Prejudice into the modern world requires some give and take.
There's also Lucia, of course, but we'll come back to her.
Meanwhile, Darcy is a hard sell here. There's not really any chemistry between her and Elisa, and she's not somebody that I can root for throughout the book. I've never been a huge fan of distant/aloof love interests, mind (I once used my dislike of alpha male heroes to illustrate a point in a job interview, and yes, I was offered the job), but this version of Darcy is less chilly and aloof than she is deeply socially awkward, and often out-and-out rude. Elisa isn't always much better—her meanness lacks Elizabeth Bennet's wit—but Darcy...oof. I might find her more interesting if there were some indication that neurodiversity is intended and she can't read standard social cues, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It's worth noting, too, that Darcy is the only character for whom an effort is made to retain some of Austen's style of language, and it...it doesn't land. (Also, a character with formal language and a seriously elitist chip on her shoulder probably isn't going to use 'that' when 'who' is correct, and she's probably not going to deign to start her higher ed at a community college. Again, nothing against community colleges, which can be a fantastic option for a number of reasons. Here, though, given what we know about these characters, I think it would have made more sense to send Elisa to a four-year college on a scholarship and have her meet Darcy there.)
While we're on the subject of language problems...the pronoun confusion in the book is something else. It's not an uncommon problem in queer romances (or other books where there are numerous characters of the same gender), but file under hoooooo boy (spoiler tag for length rather than real spoilers):
I'll stop there, but the thing is: none of these are big things. It's the sort of language problem that crops up in drafts all the time—but this sort of pronoun confusion should have been caught in edits.
I know a lot of this review is 'this didn't work for me', but I do want to highlight some lines I particularly liked:
"Does anyone still say 'boo' when they mean 'boyfriend or girlfriend?' Maria asked.
"I do. It's cute, it's easy to say, it's gender-inclusive, and it reminds me of ghosts. Win-win-win-win."
---
"Being a pessimist rocks," Maria said dryly. "I'm always either right or pleasantly surprised."
---
The student commons coffee tasted more like boiled water that had had a brown crayon dipped in it than anything actually digestible by humans, but it was caffeinated and hot—good enough.
---
I also really appreciated the attempts at diversity. Elisa is Hispanic and curvy and poor and bisexual; Darcy is black and a lesbian; Camila is trans; other characters are queer/nonbinary/etc., and these are almost all nonissues. I really wish these parts of their identity had gone deeper than surface-level, though; I don't want these identities to define the characters, but I do want them to inform them, and we really don't see much of that.
But also, consider this line: "I'm Willow, by the way," the girl said. She indicated the other two players as she and Elisa sat down at the table—a tall girl with curly, dyed-red hair, and a smaller, skinnier person who had four piercings in each ear. She's Christina, they're Keegan." Gender inclusivity! Great! But...note that Keegan is the only character mentioned in the narration as a 'person' rather than with a gendered word—before Elisa is introduced. Now, Elisa is bi, and one of her sisters is trans, so maybe she's just mindful about assumptions—except this is the only time that a binary gender isn't assumed, which just reads as authorial insertion.
Alas and alack. Still, points for trying! I'd love to see more nonbinary characters casually inhabiting books.
Now, I promised that we'd come back to how the Lydia/Lucia story plays out in this book. This is particularly interesting to me, because the way the original story goes (Lydia running off with and marrying Wickham) doesn't translate well to contemporary...well, to contemporary anything, really. Modern adaptations have handled this in a number of ways: in Bride and Prejudice, Lakhi is found and returned to her family before anything untoward happens; in Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy (yes, I've seen it, and yes, it was as bad as you'd expect), Lydia and 'Jack' are stopped on the brink of a Vegas wedding; et cetera. The emphasis is often, though not always, on getting Lydia out before bad things (read: sex) happen.
Most Ardently takes a different route, and this time the spoiler tag is here because of spoilers rather than length:
And I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand: I'm not a huge fan of the rescue-Lydia-in-the-nick-of-time twists, because there's a definite element of Missing the Point there. But on the other hand: Wickham-as-pedophile isn't true to the original character any more than whisking Lydia away to safety is true to the original plot. She's fifteen in both the original and this adaptation, and fifteen was old enough to marry in 1813 England. Even now, in some U.S. states, fourteen-year-olds can marry(!) under certain circumstances (and jfc in West Virginia there is no legal minimum as long as there's both parental and judicial consent, which I take to mean that thirteen-year-olds are routinely married upon getting pregnancy, because god knows WV isn't a state that is proactive about teaching safe sex). I've often thought that it would be truer to the original intent of the book to age up the characters somewhat in a modern adaptation: make Lydia, as the youngest, eighteen, and range the others up into their early twenties (make Kitty and Mary twins, if you like, to keep the highest ages lower). Then...let Lydia get married. Let her make that mistake. Imply that there will probably be a divorce down the line, sure, but not because Wickham is abusive—because they are young and impulsive and immature.
I don't know. That's not perfect either, but it makes me uncomfortable to dump a blanket 'Wickham is a pedophile AND an abuser AND god knows what else' on the scenario and leave it at that.
So that's where we are: I want to love the book (see again re: sign me up for a queer Pride and Prejudice), and...I don't. The source material is really hard to beat, of course, and I'd be curious to see what Mesler-Evans does with a purely original story. Until then...well. The to-read list never does end.
*Tragically, the quotations here do not have page numbers. This is because I had to read my library e-copy on Overdrive, and Overdrive is sort of terrible. There would be page numbers if it had been possible!
Unfortunately, Pride and Prejudice retellings so rarely get it right, or even come close. I've read (more than) my fair share of clunkers, and this definitely isn't among the worst offenders ([b:Mr. Darcy, Vampyre|6691280|Mr. Darcy, Vampyre|Amanda Grange|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1479860257l/6691280._SY75_.jpg|6755766] comes to mind). It's just not doing anywhere near what I'd hoped for.
Let's break it down:*
Some parts of Pride and Prejudice just don't translate well to the modern day. Take the multiple weeks(!) Julieta spends at Bobby's when she has the flu, and the weeks Elisa spends with them. This made sense in the 1800s, when travel was more arduous and medicine less reliable. But here it's just...odd. More so that Elisa keeps getting homesick and so on, and it occurs to no one that she could...like...go home. For an afternoon, or permanently. Between Bobby's and Darcy's many drivers and cars, she could be home and back in less than an hour. Julieta's happy to have her there, but it's not like she's glued to Julieta's side: she goes to class, she spends hours suffering through Darcy's company downstairs, et cetera.
Similarly, Elisa's community college class spends a week (spring break) visiting the Pemberley Museum of Art. Again, this makes sense in an Austen-era context; it makes less sense in a contemporary context. An entire week? At one museum? For a community college class? And student costs (including ravel and lodging) are only $100? I'm not knocking community colleges, but I doubt many would have the funds to make that week so affordable for students...or that would devote a whole week to one museum in the first place.
Both of these things could be easily solved: Give Julieta and Elisa's room at their flat a mould problem that has to be fixed before they can sleep there again, and bam, there's a reason to stay with Bobby. Send Elisa to Pemberley with a couple classmates for a long weekend to work on a final project, have them crash with a classmate's family, and oh hey look I think we're back in the realm of semi-realistic. Bringing Pride and Prejudice into the modern world requires some give and take.
There's also Lucia, of course, but we'll come back to her.
Meanwhile, Darcy is a hard sell here. There's not really any chemistry between her and Elisa, and she's not somebody that I can root for throughout the book. I've never been a huge fan of distant/aloof love interests, mind (I once used my dislike of alpha male heroes to illustrate a point in a job interview, and yes, I was offered the job), but this version of Darcy is less chilly and aloof than she is deeply socially awkward, and often out-and-out rude. Elisa isn't always much better—her meanness lacks Elizabeth Bennet's wit—but Darcy...oof. I might find her more interesting if there were some indication that neurodiversity is intended and she can't read standard social cues, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It's worth noting, too, that Darcy is the only character for whom an effort is made to retain some of Austen's style of language, and it...it doesn't land. (Also, a character with formal language and a seriously elitist chip on her shoulder probably isn't going to use 'that' when 'who' is correct, and she's probably not going to deign to start her higher ed at a community college. Again, nothing against community colleges, which can be a fantastic option for a number of reasons. Here, though, given what we know about these characters, I think it would have made more sense to send Elisa to a four-year college on a scholarship and have her meet Darcy there.)
While we're on the subject of language problems...the pronoun confusion in the book is something else. It's not an uncommon problem in queer romances (or other books where there are numerous characters of the same gender), but file under hoooooo boy (spoiler tag for length rather than real spoilers):
Spoiler
Charlene turned to look, and she was glad to see that she was no longer looking at her.There are three different female characters in this sentence. Rewritten for clarity, it might read, Charlene turned to look, and Elisa was glad to see that Darcy was no longer looking in their direction.
At school, Darcy hadn't said much, which was a relief. She'd worried that she'd ask about her date, and she didn't want to give her the satisfaction of admitting it hadn't worked out.Only two characters here, so it is more or less readable. But still, rewritten: At school, Darcy hadn't said much, which was a relief. Elisa had worried that Darcy would ask about her date, and she didn't want to give Darcy the satisfaction of admitting it hadn't worked out.
She nodded. "I know. Too sweet for her own good sometimes."That's two different 'she' characters right there. Sub in names, and we'd be good to go. On the same page:
She sighed, thinking of Julieta. "I know what you mean."
"Does the phrase 'Winchester Academy' ring a bell?" she asked.This isn't rocket science, guys. Change 'she glared at her' to 'Darcy glared at her' and I wouldn't be able to complain about this.
She glared at her.
The food court was mobbed, which would hopefully buy her enough time to make the call before she got back.Elisa's making the call, but before Julieta gets back. Ai yi yi.
"If I want you to speak, I'll ask you," Catherine barked.Wait, when did Charlene have a...oh. Catherine turned back to her son. I see.
"No one asked you to speak, you know," Charlene said.
She turned back to her son.
I'll stop there, but the thing is: none of these are big things. It's the sort of language problem that crops up in drafts all the time—but this sort of pronoun confusion should have been caught in edits.
I know a lot of this review is 'this didn't work for me', but I do want to highlight some lines I particularly liked:
"Does anyone still say 'boo' when they mean 'boyfriend or girlfriend?' Maria asked.
"I do. It's cute, it's easy to say, it's gender-inclusive, and it reminds me of ghosts. Win-win-win-win."
---
"Being a pessimist rocks," Maria said dryly. "I'm always either right or pleasantly surprised."
---
The student commons coffee tasted more like boiled water that had had a brown crayon dipped in it than anything actually digestible by humans, but it was caffeinated and hot—good enough.
---
I also really appreciated the attempts at diversity. Elisa is Hispanic and curvy and poor and bisexual; Darcy is black and a lesbian; Camila is trans; other characters are queer/nonbinary/etc., and these are almost all nonissues. I really wish these parts of their identity had gone deeper than surface-level, though; I don't want these identities to define the characters, but I do want them to inform them, and we really don't see much of that.
But also, consider this line: "I'm Willow, by the way," the girl said. She indicated the other two players as she and Elisa sat down at the table—a tall girl with curly, dyed-red hair, and a smaller, skinnier person who had four piercings in each ear. She's Christina, they're Keegan." Gender inclusivity! Great! But...note that Keegan is the only character mentioned in the narration as a 'person' rather than with a gendered word—before Elisa is introduced. Now, Elisa is bi, and one of her sisters is trans, so maybe she's just mindful about assumptions—except this is the only time that a binary gender isn't assumed, which just reads as authorial insertion.
Alas and alack. Still, points for trying! I'd love to see more nonbinary characters casually inhabiting books.
Now, I promised that we'd come back to how the Lydia/Lucia story plays out in this book. This is particularly interesting to me, because the way the original story goes (Lydia running off with and marrying Wickham) doesn't translate well to contemporary...well, to contemporary anything, really. Modern adaptations have handled this in a number of ways: in Bride and Prejudice, Lakhi is found and returned to her family before anything untoward happens; in Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy (yes, I've seen it, and yes, it was as bad as you'd expect), Lydia and 'Jack' are stopped on the brink of a Vegas wedding; et cetera. The emphasis is often, though not always, on getting Lydia out before bad things (read: sex) happen.
Most Ardently takes a different route, and this time the spoiler tag is here because of spoilers rather than length:
Spoiler
In this book, Wickham is a pedophile, full-stop. He abused Darcy's little sister—sexually, physically, emotionally—when she was thirteen, and he abuses Lucia (again, sexually, physically, and emotionally) when she is fifteen. She's missing for a couple of weeks (holed up in a motel with Wick), and when she comes back she's bruised and hurting.And I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand: I'm not a huge fan of the rescue-Lydia-in-the-nick-of-time twists, because there's a definite element of Missing the Point there. But on the other hand: Wickham-as-pedophile isn't true to the original character any more than whisking Lydia away to safety is true to the original plot. She's fifteen in both the original and this adaptation, and fifteen was old enough to marry in 1813 England. Even now, in some U.S. states, fourteen-year-olds can marry(!) under certain circumstances (and jfc in West Virginia there is no legal minimum as long as there's both parental and judicial consent, which I take to mean that thirteen-year-olds are routinely married upon getting pregnancy, because god knows WV isn't a state that is proactive about teaching safe sex). I've often thought that it would be truer to the original intent of the book to age up the characters somewhat in a modern adaptation: make Lydia, as the youngest, eighteen, and range the others up into their early twenties (make Kitty and Mary twins, if you like, to keep the highest ages lower). Then...let Lydia get married. Let her make that mistake. Imply that there will probably be a divorce down the line, sure, but not because Wickham is abusive—because they are young and impulsive and immature.
I don't know. That's not perfect either, but it makes me uncomfortable to dump a blanket 'Wickham is a pedophile AND an abuser AND god knows what else' on the scenario and leave it at that.
So that's where we are: I want to love the book (see again re: sign me up for a queer Pride and Prejudice), and...I don't. The source material is really hard to beat, of course, and I'd be curious to see what Mesler-Evans does with a purely original story. Until then...well. The to-read list never does end.
*Tragically, the quotations here do not have page numbers. This is because I had to read my library e-copy on Overdrive, and Overdrive is sort of terrible. There would be page numbers if it had been possible!